Mad Max Runs

There’s a scene in my all-time favourite film, The Last Samurai, in which Tom Cruise’s character, Nathan Algren is getting an absolute shellacking with a wooden sword in an impromptu battle. It’s hammering down with rain. He fights to the best of his ability, but time and again he’s no match for his opponent and is thrown to the ground. He isn’t fully rehearsed in reading his enemy and knowing the right way to fight back. He hasn’t yet failed enough to have learned how not to fail. Every time you think he’s not going to get up again, he does. (All but the last time, but that’s not where we are for the purpose of this story!) Where we are, is that a race that’s succeeded in throttling me twice is in my sights for the third time on 2 September. The Ridgeway 86 - Ivinghoe Beacon to the Avebury Stones. Basically you run a hilly trail marathon before you complete the Race to the Stones 100k route. There are certainly much bigger beasts to tame in the ultra world but this is my beast.  T...

Some 12 hours before the start of my R86+ revenge round, I spotted a new bruise on the lower inside of my shin. The attachment point of the peroneal, outside of the leg above the ankle, was also a bit more sore and twingey than one would expect, having done little else but ride in taxis and trains all day. Even the three mile shakeout walk I had planned failed to materialise, but still there sat the exceptionally un-funny comedy duo of Bruise and Twinge, daring me to dare greatly.  Into the epsom salt bath went I, pleading with the fates to let me have my meticulously-planned day in the sun. Nothing else hurt.  This would become a theme. Long story short, it could have gone either way. Had the stars aligned slightly jigged to the right, or left, or anywhere else but where I found them, it really could have. It all went so right, until it went so wrong. If ultrarunning had a mantra, I think that'd be it. I woke for the R86+ redux with great anticipation and greater co...

Near on two weeks later and I'm still waking up on the Pennine Way in my dreams. Usually a technical bit, the rocks underfoot distant cousins of the one that tripped me up and fractured my finger on the Ridgeway back in May, this time buried to the left of a steep drop off. One false move and I've got a motherless disabled son at home. Good lord what a journey was that Spine Sprint. To start with, I finished. I finished while walking with Joy (quite literally, my trail companion from darkness to finish line was a redhead named Joy, like some kind of mantra in my skull handing out deliverance "you'll finish and you'll finish happy and here's just the person to rally with.") We had some 29 minutes to spare, after 17 and a half hours of what was for me the most stunning, anxiety-riddled, clock-chasing, addictive race I've ever done. My goodness, I actually did it. How on earth did I finish this race? I trained my arse off from the minute I booked ...

I do not like that DNF, I do not like the miles I left. I do not like that memory - Of quitting time, of stopping me. I do not like the dream replay, I'm at mile 70 every day. No bones were sticking out my leg, I cracked just like a broken egg. Two points of pride are what I've left, Along with one fat DNF. It's not Shakespeare but it's all I've got at the moment. Tell you what, had I known the level of torment that Ridgeway 86 conclusion would deliver me, I'd have mulled it over a bit longer.  I don't know that I could have physically done things any differently to be fair, but to say I'm haunted by the outcome is a bit of an understatement. It's also significantly unfortunate. But more so, I think it's just mostly about the unfinished business. So seeing as I was struggling to identify the perfect way to mark my 50th birthday next month, this is now a no-brainer. I retired at 8:47 am. So on my birthday, October 28, at 8:47 am, I will set ...

Who knew a cinder block could be so comfortable? May well have been at The Four Seasons, that. Solid underneath and a place of rest. Again. My goodness, what a journey was that Ridgeway (not)86. To my right, the path up to Waylands Smithy, tucked neatly behind a curtain of mist. Ahead, a young man and woman who'd just passed, while eyeing me curiously to determine whether I needed some kind of assistance or perhaps some kind of rubber room.  Neither, friends. Just a bed. It seems that my thousand mile stare is also hideous at maths, as it must have gone light years by then. And out there ahead, more fog swallowed up those two people walking with feet that weren't battered by miles, and effort, and hills and chalk and...and...and... There's me, so slumped over I may well have been boneless, taking one deep breath after the other to regain control of my breathing, regain some mental focus, make some decisions. I looked around again, closed my eyes and shook my head....

Surrounded by the inky Shropshire pre-dawn sky, I sat cross-legged in the road, hand torch clenched between my teeth, shining feebly over a map of the area. I'd fortunately been meticulous in marking up my desired route on the map, which is extra lucky, as the GPS I'd finally begun to rely on had just lost connection. I managed a(nother) stream of cursing around the torch without it falling, so that's something. My watch was looped around my vest, still running, still ticking away the hours, still chasing cutoff times. One lead connected it to the charging block in my pocket, while I'd been swapping another between phone and headlamp for a few hours, currently settled on the lamp. I frowned and leaned over to get a closer look at the map in a desperate attempt to identify my position on the planet, and the charging block flew out of my pocket for the first time of what would be many before this seemingly endless night was done. To say I was tired of being lost in ...

This was a two stick job, no bones about it. Three if you count the Buzzer baton, but that  has now apparently transformed into a sausage , if you believe Dave Payne of Ultra Challenges. I'm not sure where to begin as per, when something so massive has exploded and been once again left simmering, with swollen knees, brain fog and lungs full of wheeze from an overabundance of hay-smelling farms and pollen. It was a lumpy sort of weekend. That kind of weekend I suspect I'd have absolutely smashed, howling in the most triumphant of triumph - would I have been injury free. But (very stupidly, in retrospect) I told those tendons I'd injured by merely tying my shoes too tight (the shame of it all) that they weren't going to take me down, I'd be 'aving them. So I went in the car and up up up to Kendal therewith that magical Realbuzz Baton whispering sweet nothings in my ear. "Go forth and Buzzzzzzzz..."  It's what I do after all. There has never m...